Day 6

Hiya!

Today was a working day again. As we’d finished our main task (painting the bunkhouse and accompanying bathrooms), we got a new one: recoating the roundhouse with lime. This is necessary because the entire house is made out of wood and straw, and there is no electric light inside, which means that visitors mostly use candles. You can sense it coming: the entire house is very flammable, and the lime is a fire retardant. To protect our skins, hair and eyes (!), we wore coveralls, with shower caps on top and glasses. You can probably imagine how stupid we looked. Of course, we wanted to take a picture of us, but we wanted to be on the picture together. Luckily, Steve was around to take that picture for us. Anyhow, we had to mix the lime with water to make it useable, and did that with a huge mixer attached to a drill. This splashed around a lot, so those who did the mixing got covered in the lime putty. Luckily we had all brought our old clothing, so we were all fine.  We spent the entire morning and most of the afternoon smearing the lime on the panels, but we didn’t even have time to start on the walls (it is a pretty big house), so tomorrow we’ll continue doing that. There was one tiny mishap when one of us got some lime in her eye and we had to flush it with water. We all got a spook, but it was alright; no one got hurt badly. Afterwards we had some time to ourselves, and spent it all doing our own thing (mostly we just read our books or listened to some music). We also prepared dinner, and played some games afterwards.

One of the things which I did not know beforehand, and now that I’m here can’t avoid, is the fact that everyone here calls every single meal ‘tea’. When Pam comes in during our breakfast she tells us to enjoy our tea and when we offer Steve to have lunch with us he tells us that he’s already had tea. It sounds so strange to me though, I’m glad that we don’t do that at home.

Marjolein

#Scotland #somuchfun #hiyamrMeek #limewashing